From Hotline, Sam Brownback’s announcement:

“I am declaring today my candidacy for President of the United States.

“Ours is a great nation and I make one pledge to you, to use our greatness for goodness.

“We are a great nation because our greatness is built on the foundation of fundamental goodness. If ever we lose our goodness, we will surely lose our greatness. Our purposes, from the time of our nation’s founding, have always been bigger than we are. They must be if we are to fulfill our destiny.

“But destinies are built on daily achievements. Inch by inch, step by step, we press on to our higher calling. Today I wish to state what I believe those next steps are, for our nation and for our people.

“Two hundred years ago this year, a little known British Parliamentarian by the name of William Wilberforce finally achieved success after a lifetime of effort to end the slave trade in the British Empire. A committed Christian who believed his faith should be a force for good in Britain and around the world, Wilberforce had two great passions: ending the slave trade and renewing the culture. Although his goals appeared impossibly lofty, both were achieved.

“He used Britain’s greatness for goodness.

“Our mandate today has a similar feel. If William Wilberforce were alive today, I believe he would be passionately fighting for the dignity of every human life everywhere, without regard to race, wealth, or status. He would also feel compelled to take up the vital cause of renewing the family and the culture.

“These are our fights today.

“We must fight for the downtrodden, the voiceless and the powerless. We must fight for freedom and justice. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of our heritage.

“But, our land needs healing.

“Our people need hope.

“Our world needs help.

“We need reconciliation. Lincoln properly observed that, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ We are divided and need healing.

“We need to rebuild our families. We need stronger families! We need people belonging and committed! By doing so, we will reduce poverty, strengthen our nation and increase hope.

“We need to support the foundational institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman for life. We should support marriage, not tax it. It’s wrong to take away welfare benefits just because someone gets married. Marriage remains the best place to raise children–not the only place, but the best.

“We must stop wasteful spending that steals a families’ income and then insults them by throwing their money away on pork-barrel projects.

“And we need more opportunities–not more taxes. I’ve never voted for a tax increase, and I certainly will never sign one!

“But that’s not enough. We need a different income tax system altogether. This one, the Internal Revenue Code, should be taken behind the barn and killed with a dull axe.

“I propose the creation of an alternative flat tax, which lets the people choose which system works for them.

“We need a social security system in which all Americans are given a choice in how to prepare for their retirement; a choice they do not presently have. No one should be required to leave the current system, and everyone must be guaranteed their current level of benefits. Every American should be given this freedom.

“We are a large nation. Let’s start embracing American-sized goals that lift us up and pull us together!

“Let’s put our energies into conquering the number one fear in America: the fear of getting cancer. We can end deaths by cancer in ten years. [bold mine-DL] The last two years have seen a decrease in deaths by cancer. It’s time to put this killer to death. With our intense effort, we can make it a chronic–rather than a terminal–illness. What a gift to humanity!

“We need high-quality, affordable health care for everyone. [bold mine-DL] Here, let me step back for a moment. I am a conservative. A conservative that believes in addressing problems, not ignoring them. We must address our health care problems with market-based solutions, not government-run health care. We can, and we must. This topic requires our urgent attention.

“We must be energy self-reliant in North America in the next fifteen years–at the same time we need to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. This is possible using our ingenuity, resources, and determination.

“Also, we need judges who want to be judges, not legislators.

“And for goodness sakes, the last thing we need in America is to take God out of our public lives and institutions! We need to embrace our nation’s motto ‘In God We Trust,’ not be ashamed of it. Search the record of history. To walk away from the almighty is to embrace decline for a nation. To embrace him leads to renewal, for individuals and for nations.

“Something most people feel deeply in their hearts is the need for a culture of life–a culture that doesn’t allow the strong to exploit the weak–a culture of compassion instead of a culture of convenience. Life is beautiful. We all know this. Let’s start following our hearts and work to protect all innocent human life.

“We are a nation at war. I just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops–the finest, most courageous people our nation has to offer–are fighting for the cause of liberty in places that have never known her. It is a long fight. We will win. We cannot lose our will to win! We must win to redeem our troops’ sacrifice. Let us resolve to have a bipartisan strategy for the war. We need unity here to win over there. This is not the time for partisanship on any side. Lives–and our future–are at stake.

“We will achieve these goals, not through government action, but by tapping into our innate goodness as a society and working together. This is how America has always achieved great goals.

“At the end of the day, it comes back to the basics: faith, family, and freedom. America is great because she is good. That goodness is not based in Washington, or New York, or even Topeka. It is based in the hearts of the American people. This is a goodness whose author is the divine. A goodness that doesn’t let us rest until our neighbor is at peace. A goodness that feels the chains of another rub on our own skin. A goodness from God that demands our vigilant action.

“How much better we will be as we seek to live the great commandment to love God and one another.

“Yes, we are great and that is a humbling thing, for to whom much is given, much is required.

“Let us, in this generation, continue our destiny of greatness by focusing on the heart, a heart full of good. That’s what I’ll seek to do everyday.

“So it is with sincere humility and a determination to do good that I declare my candidacy for President of the United States.

“God bless you all, and may God continue to bless this great nation!

In an unsurprising display of executive branch idolatry, George Weigel, the man who learned to stop worrying and love aggressive war, declares that Secretary Rice–this incompetent, tiresome appointee–should have shown contempt to the elected representatives of the nation.  Thus Weigel:

BY AUGUST 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had taken all he could stand from those congressional critics whom he privately dismissed as “the primitives.” So when Nebraska Sen. Kenneth Wherry leaned across a hearing table and wagged a finger, Acheson blew up. He leaped to his feet and demanded that Wherry not “shake his dirty finger in my face.” Wherry said he’d do as he pleased. “By God, you won’t,” Acheson hollered — and prepared to land a haymaker until restrained by State Department legal counsel Adrian Fisher, a former college football player.

I couldn’t help thinking of that scene from Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’ multi-biography, “The Wise Men,” last week. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is, one suspects, far too polite to respond Acheson-style to the indignities she absorbed during her first appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But would anyone have blamed her if, in response to Chuck Hagel’s ambitions or Barbara Boxer’s personal nastiness, she had said something like this:

“Look, senators, there are real consequences to our ‘ending the war’ in Iraq, as the new speaker of the House has put it — rather glibly, if I may say. Those consequences include a bloodbath, chaos throughout the Mideast and perhaps the emergence of an apocalyptic maniac in Tehran as the regional hegemonist. Do you think that would play well in Omaha? Or Sacramento? I don’t. In any event, I’ve got important things to do, and they don’t include sitting here acting like my mother’s pin cushion. I’ll be back when you’re ready to get serious. Impeach me if you like. They pay a lot better at Stanford.”

Actually, one of the things expected of a minister in government is to suffer the scrutiny of the legislative branch.  It is one of the principal mechanisms allowed to the legislative to check and supervise the actions of the executive.  Autocrats and their hangers-on find this obnoxious, as well they might, but republicans and constitutionalists respect this as an integral and necessary functioning of the government and a way to ensure some minimal accountability for policy decisions.  It is one of the few practical methods the representatives of the people in Congress assembled have these days to hold to the fire the feet of these pompous would-be lords who believe they have received some holy mandate to do what they please with the people’s government.  Oversight of this kind is one of those small triumphs over an arbitrary executive won over decades and centuries of struggle with the claims of the Crown that our ancestors wisely chose to incorporate into the management of affairs in our government. 

Was Sen. Boxer’s observation correct that Secretary Rice makes her bold, declarative statements about the war in Iraq without any personal stake in the consequences?  Yes.  Was that the most relevant thing to point out during the hearing?  Obviously not.  Yet it was not irrelevant, nor was it “nasty.”  The whinging of jingoes about how rudely and roughly they are being treated now that they can no longer intimidate, shout down and otherwise insult their opposition is simply pathetic.   Sen. Boxer’s remark–which, as usual given the idiocy of the media, was made into some sort of cat-fight over the true meaning of feminism–was an observation that those who are most blithe about committing American soldiers to war happen to be those whose families bear no risk of suffering from the evils of that war.  This statement may not be a terribly important one to make (since most people in this country are in no danger of seeing their friends and family in danger because of the Iraq war, which does not invalidate their opinions), but it is true and perfectly legitimate.

There are many more things that I can and probably will say later about Mr. Weigel’s depressing, embarrassing op-ed, but I have no time this afternoon.

You know that Romney has relatively high unfavourable numbers (35% at last check), but how does Mormonism itself do?  Alerted to the problem by Friday’s HotlineTV,  I was intrigued to find that the numbers are just as staggeringly bad for Mormonism nationwide as the earlier Rasmussen poll results indicated.  According to the new Diageo/Hotline poll from this month (question 10b), Mormonism has an unfav rating of 39% (17% strongly unfav) compared to a fav rating of 27%.  The main good news for Mormons?  34% had either heard of Mormonism but couldn’t rate it either way, or hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know enough to say, and it receives a barely more favourable response from the general public than Islam (18/41).   

Nonetheless, among Republicans, Mormonism is viewed somewhat or “strongly” unfavourably by 48% (strongly unfav is 24%).  Mormonism receives the best response from independents (31/26) and fairly negative numbers among Democrats (27/38).  The infamous Rasmussen poll from last year showed that only 19% of likely voters could identify Mitt Romney as the Mormon in the race–how much worse will his unfavourables get when more of these voters learn of his religious affiliation?

Other interesting religious items from the poll: 24% of Republicans have an unfavourable opinion of Catholicism (which is higher than Judaism’s unfav rating of 16% among the same people), which may help explain why there has still never been a Catholic Republican presidential nominee (and one reason why there probably will not be one for a while yet).

We also need to come together as a nation to protect all life, no matter how old or where in the world that life is, whether in Darfur [bold mine-DL] or in the heartland of America or in Iraq, or whether elderly or in the womb. ~Sam Brownback, online presidential announcement

He also vows to “stop” cancer.  Good luck on that one.  He then says that he’s not running “to change the world,” just to “change America,” which will nonetheless change the world.  That’s very reassuring.

Brownback is officially in.

For Brownback, the attraction to Wilberforce and abolitionism was only natural: The senator grew up near Osawatomie, Kan., the town from which John Brown launched murderous attacks on pro-slavery men a century and a half ago, earning the pre–Harper’s Ferry nickname “Osawatomie Brown.” When Brownback learned that forms of slavery were still being practiced in Sudan and elsewhere, it outraged him. “I couldn’t believe this was going on,” he says. “It was just wrong, and we needed to do something about it.” ~John Miller

There many things that are wrong in the world.  There is a word to describe someone who thinks that all those problems are our problems that “we need” to “do something” about and that our government exists to right the wrongs of the world.  That word is not conservative.

Today, Brownback is all about the love — not just for the Clintons, but for everyone. As he mulls a long-shot bid for the White House in 2008, he is trying to reinvent the politics of compassionate conservatism for the post-Bush era. “The term ‘compassionate conservatism’ is great, but it’s basically a marketing term,” he says. “I think it’s been overused in rhetoric and underutilized in public policy. I want to make it a reality.” His idea is to place love and compassion for human life at the center of everything, from the traditional issues of abortion, cloning, and euthanasia to the less traditional ones of immigration, pharmaceutical patents, and North Korea. ~John Miller

In other words, he wants bleeding heart conservatism’s heart to really bleed, and not just bleed for show.  Can someone please explain to me why this is appealing?

Nonetheless, if you can somehow get past this–and that’s not easy to do when it is the core of his campaign–it is worth remembering that he was was the one who took the lead in shutting down the Miers nomination.  Brownback is a puzzle this way: his general outlook on, say, foreign policy is Wilsonian and drippy enough to give you night terrors, but then he manages to come to the right position on the “surge” and negotiating with Syria and Iran anyway.  It’s almost as if he sometimes make the right decisions in spite of his worldview.  That’s hardly a compelling reason to support him.  Perhaps when Ross returns from his self-imposed blog exile, he can give us some compelling reasons.

“…There were three elections held. Those were a powerful demonstration of what no one is able to deny, even those who now want to turn away and give up on Iraq. Which is that the majority of the Iraqi people want a better life for themselves and their families. The majority is not involved in sectarian violence and clearly not involved in terrorism.” ~Kimberley Strassel

Everyone wants a better life for himself and his family.  That’s the most vapid thing anyone can say.  It’s right up there with “‘Everyone wants to be free” or “everyone wants to be happy.”  Well, that’s nice, but how many people know how to acquire these things?  How many people understand that you really can’t have both freedom and happiness?  But leave that for another time. 

Lieberman is whistling past the graveyard if he still insists that people should think of these elections as some sort of success.  As democratists are only too happy to point out when their democratisation empowers horrible killers and maniacs: “Elections are not the whole of democracy!”  To which I reply, “Well, okay, so stop talking about having elections as if it were proof of some success in democratisation.” 

The consequences of these elections have been dire.  They have not only politicised sectarian and ethnic identities even more than they were before, and they have not only managed to establish a Shi’ite majoritarian tyranny backed by the death squads and militias of the Shi’ite coalition parties, but the elections have created the absurd situation where the present government, our supposed ally in this conflict, depends for its existence on the political support of one of the primary causes of sectarian strife and has been entirely subservient to the interests of this sectarian faction for the past year.  Democracy, to the extent that it has actually come into existence in Iraq, has worked to the detriment of Iraq’s stability and security, and has therefore directly and negatively affected the U.S. mission in Iraq. 

Not surprisingly, holding elections in a war zone will tend to empower those who campaign on a platform of fanaticism, self-righteous anger and appeals to unity against your faction’s enemies.  Elections in such an environment are positively destabilising and dangerous.  To have three elections in the middle of the war indicates that on three separate occasions Washington foolishly treated one of the most dangerous sources of political instability as a near-panacea for the political and security ills of Iraq.  That Lieberman, at this late date, continues to repeat this nonsense suggests that he is unfit to speak on such matters.

At the center of this fray is Sen. Lieberman, a sort of Horatio at the congressional bridge–spiritedly trying to hold back a bipartisan stampede out of Iraq that he believes will result in devastating consequences for that country, the region and, most importantly, U.S. national security.

“Iraq is the central part of a larger and ultimately longer-term conflict in the Middle East between moderates and extremists, between democrats and dictators, between Iran- and Iraq-sponsored terrorism and the rest of the Middle East. . . . Are we going to surrender to them, surrender that country to them, and encourage people like them to be in authority and power all over the Middle East and in a better position to strike us again?” asks Mr. Lieberman. If only Livy had his quill today. ~Kimberley Strassel

Never mind that Horatio was defending Rome against invasion, not trying to persuade the Senate to persist in the invasion of some distant country that brought Rome nothing but grief.  Such is the confusion of war supporters that they mistake the unflinching endorsement of the warfare state’s misguided policies for patriotic valour.  (Then again, they have confused these two for quite a while, so this is nothing new.)  It’s more like Lieberman is some senator urging Augustus to send more legions into the Teutoberg Forest shortly after Varro’s legions were annihilated.  “We can’t withdraw behind the Rhine!  Defensible boundaries?  That would be crazy!”

Watch out: we’re coming for you, Hedges!

I never did get around to finishing Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.  Every few pages, after drawing you in with his fairly interesting stories and “straight from the front” war reporting experience that had informed his project, he would say something so phenomenally stupid (usually about the Balkans) that you simply had to stop reading for a little while so that you could still take him seriously when you resumed.  In the end, I stopped once too often and never continued.  Perhaps that was a mistake in that case, but here I think we are safe in assuming that a book that claims fascism is on the rise in America in the form of Christian fundamentalism is incredibly silly and almost needs no other comment.  

It appears that Mr. Hedges has taken his previous mixed bag of experience, insight and stupidity and taken out the first two parts, coming up with American Fascists with what remains.  Instead of more credibly noting that it is neoconservatives who exalt the power of will, glorify war and express a sort of aggressive hypernationalism and exude a secularising, revolutionary and modernist fervour similar to those of historic fascists, Hedges manages to target adherents of Dominion theology as the “American fascists.”  Here Hedges reminds us that to call someone a fascist is mainly to say, “I really hate that guy.”  It has no real meaning, because it never bears any relationship to the reality of the person or idea being described.  It hardly needs to be said that anyone who confuses the belief that the world should ordered according to Christ’s will with fascism, which is as close to the antithesis of this as there is, cannot be taken at all seriously.  Yet for some reason, for many on the right today, it is not clear that carrying out the will of Allah and exalting a secular nation-state are two radically different and mutually opposed things.  It is no wonder that left-liberals continue to indulge their favourite anti-Christian tropes when those conventionally assumed to be on the right begin babbling about fascist-this and fascist-that.  If an intellectually shallow slogan is good enough for them, why not for the left-liberals, too? 

For many of the same reasons why Islamofascist is a ridiculous and stupid term that ought to be driven from our political discourse forever, applying the word fascist to Christian fundamentalists of any stripe in this country is painfully wrong and betrays such an ignorance of what fascism is as to make the entirety of Hedges’ argument virtually worthless sight unseen.  It is worth mentioning here that all of the endless braying about Islamofascism or “Islamic fascism” has helped to give a new lease on life to this absurd designation of contemporary political and religious movements, so that the Ledeens, Hansons and Santorums have helped to pave the way for Chris Hedges’ screed.  Joining in the old leftist cant of screaming, “Fascist!” while directing this rhetoric at jihadis, warmongers in this country have legitimised the basically illegitimate, destructive rhetorical habit of flinging the word fascist at all and sundry whom you find offensive.  As it always has and always will, it functions as a replacement for argument.  Using it is to strike a pose of moral righteousness as a way of denouncing someone else as ideologically deviant in the worst possible way and to tie their ideas, no matter how completely unrelated they are to fascism, to the crimes and horrors of Nazism in particular.  This tactic superficially endows the user with moral authority and a sense of historic purpose: my policy preferences and prejudices are not simply that, but they are expressions of a noble, abiding anti-fascist cause, and to oppose my positions is to objectively take the side of fascists everywhere.  To oppose my views on taxes (or foreign policy or health care or pensions) is to reincarnate the secular equivalent of absolute evil.  Because the anti-fascist has taken a stand against fascism of whatever kind, everything else he touches is “sanctified” by association, just as anything associated (however falsely and dishonestly) with fascism is automatically considered dangerous, foul and retrograde.  This is quite mad, but it is also fairly common in our political discourse today.   

Like their neocon cousins (cousins whom they may despise, but who are nonetheless related to them), left-liberals define who they are by their “anti-fascism,” past and present, and perceive all of their enemies at home and abroad as varyingly serious versions of fascist.  Fascism–or the illusion of it conjured up by polemicists–is a force that gives liberals meaning.  When I say liberals, I am including many who are not normally considered to be either liberal or on the left. 

If I can overgeneralise a little, left-liberals are liberals who tend to see fascists all around them at home, while neocons are liberals who see fascists everywhere else in the world.  They are two sets of liberals who use the same kind of language, the same warnings, the same lame allusions to mid-twentieth century politics and international affairs and work from roughly the same assumptions about what constitutes the good, liberal democratic alternative.  All of them are preoccupied with finding and combating the new fascism and with preventing the rise and/or success of some supposed echo of Nazism; their shared moment, which they pretend they are always reliving, are the years just before and during WWII.  Jonah Goldberg has perhaps managed to combine these two kinds of paranoia by aligning left-liberals, at least rhetorically, with fascism and believing that the world is full of other new fascists.       

All of Hedges’ heavy breathing might be worth at least a chuckle, except that Dominionists have zero power in this country and are effectively represented by nobody in politics today.    Plus, it isn’t even new by the standards of lame, left-liberal attacks on religious conservatism–Michelle Goldberg and Damon Linker both beat Hedges to the theocratic punch last year with different, but related warning cries about impending theocratic domination in Kingdom Coming and The Theocons.  As Ross Douthat told us at the time, these books are all very silly and deeply flawed.